The working life of Museum of London

Museum of London is updating its branding and as a result the websites are undergoing a redesign for the rebrand launch on 14 October 2008.

We have been very busy working behind the screens to migrate the information from our ‘Group’ website to the Museum of London website and ensuring the rebrand is reflected in the Museum of London Docklands website (previously Museum in Docklands) and the Museum of London Archaeology website (Previously Museum of London Archaeology Service, or MoLAS).

You will see the new logos and redesigned sites when you visit us on 14 October, and the ‘Group’ website will no longer be updated and will eventually cease to exist.

This is just phase one of our plans. We aim to move all Museum of London content into a single website and will be planning further design changes and architectural changes to the site.

We would like to find out what our visitors think of the websites as of 14 October and how it might develop in the future. Please send your comments to: webmanager@museumoflondon.org.uk.

And if you participate in our focus groups to tell us what you think of our new website design, you will receive £30!

If you are interested in getting involved, and giving us your views, please visit:

www.creativeresearch.co.uk/surveys/mol/molrecruit.htm

Please note we are looking to hear from:

• Individuals aged 16 and above,
• Families (one adult aged 25 to 50 and one child aged 5 to 15 per family),
• People from both the UK and from overseas, and
• You do not need to be familiar with the Museum or its subject matter to take part.

LAARC has just started a new project - LAARC Volunteer Inclusion Project. The general idea is to create more space in the archive by effective, efficient storage, using the help of 30 volunteers a week.

As well as creating space for future archives, we are also promoting inclusivity and learning opportunities and shall be running specialist workshops for volunteers.

There is a new section of these blog pages specifically for the project so have a look and see what we’re up to.

http://mymuseumoflondon.org.uk/blogs/laarcvip/

As part of the project we welcome back the University of the Third Age (U3A) who shall be improving the archive for MSL87 - one of the Roman Eastern Cemetery Sites. This side of the project has its own website and can be found at:

http://laarcvipu3a.wetpaint.com/

And don’t forget our archaeology blog pages, where each month we run the object of the month competition. Click below to find out September’s winner

http://mymuseumoflondon.org.uk/blogs/archaeology

 Woo hoo! LAARChaeology is taking over!!!

The past month I have been able to attend two conferences related to the study of human remains and archaeology. Conferences are a great opportunity to see what other people who work in this area have been up to. Academics, students and archaeologists discuss their current research projects, interests and new and exiting developments in the field. These also provide a chance for us to inform others about the recent work MoLAS has been involved in, and create links with people to work with in the future.

The first conference was organised by the Wellcome Trust. This has a well established interest in Bioarchaeology, the use of scientific methods in archaeology. The Wellcome Trust has provided a valuable source for funding research projects in the past, including the Wellcome Osteological Research Database (WORD) used by the Museum of London to record Skeletons. The Wellcome Collection is also the home to the current ‘Skeletons, Londons buried bones exhibition’.

The meeting was designed to bring the fields of archaeology, biology and medicine together and provide a forum for archaeologists and scientists to meet and develop new ideas. There was a range of fascinating talks about the latest advances in ancient DNA and other molecules obtained from archaeological remains. These can be used to answer questions and tell stories about human origins, development and movements in the past. They have also been used to show what people ate, how healthy they were and even what colour hair they may have had. Biomolecules extracted from human bone can also be used to determine how diseases and illnesses such as TB may have affected people in the past. This information can be used to help understand how these pathogens spread and aid our knowledge of disease in the modern world. 

Next I headed to Oxford for the 10th annual conference of the British Association of Biological Anthropology and Osteoarchaeology. Again, this was a great chance to meet and talk to prominent people, colleagues and those interested in the field of human osteology. There were interesting talks about the use of biomolecules in archaeology and also new research into changes to the body before and after death. This included how human remains can tell us about an individuals lifestyle, work and health. Skeletal remains may also show how someone adapted to different environments and activities and also the treatment of a body after death. My colleague Natasha Powers discussed the recent findings of a MoLAS excavation at the grounds of the Royal London Hospital that uncovered coffins containing dissected body portions and evidence of scalpel cuts, sawing and preparation of specimens.

Another part of conferences are the poster displays. These are gallery-like areas where people present current topics, work and research interests, in a poster format for people to view and ask questions. This year myself and colleague Don Walker presented posters about our recent work using computed radiography and also the evidence we have found for pipe smoking.

Late:Create is an exciting monthly workshop where members get creative using our collections for inspiration. 

The workshop was lead by poet Meryl Pugh, and here, our regular blogger Liam, tells us more:

‘This months Late:Create was poetry. We were taught that there are different ways of writing poetry – some rhyme and some don’t. We learnt how about consonance, which means using similar sounds in words.  For example, bored and board. We also talked about assonance, which means using the same sounds such as ‘ard’ in lard and hard.
 
Next we started writing. We each had an object from the museum and had to describe its features, what it was used for and who used it. We went into the galleried to collect this information. Next we were ready to write a poem. Meryl helped us by writing the first word or two of each sentence and we filled in the rest using the ideas and words we had gathered.’

Late: Create is free and takes place 6 – 8pm on the 1st Thursday of every month and is for people who are currently out of work. Future workshops include sculpture and hat-making. The sessions are coordinated by the Museum’s Inclusion Officer, Lucie Fitton. To find out more contact community@museumoflondon.org.uk

Back in April I mentioned that we had very gently gone live with the
Database of 19th Century Photographers and Allied Trades in London 1841-1901 on the photoLondon website. It seems like a good time for an update for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, the site has proved to be quite a success, at least compared with our modest expectations. Actual visits and pageviews have only crept up gradually since the launch, albeit with a few great flurries of activity. We get around 3000 visits a month and people tend to look at 7 or 8 pages per visit. But user reaction has been growing inexorably, with more people contacting us through the website every week as they find their ancestors or seek the photographer of a photo they own.  I think that Google is sending a lot more of our visits now, which means people with very specific interests and questions - which you should probably expect with a database of 10,000 people! Still I don’t think we were expecting quite so many inquiries, and it’s often hard to offer more than is already on the site. Tunjay, who is the administrator in our Later Department, does everything possible to give a helpful answer, but the fact is that we at the Museum of London aren’t the source of or experts about the data; that role belongs to David Webb, whose many years of research he generously contributed to the database.

The second reason for an update is that we were contacted while ago by the production team of a TV programme that’s due to air very shortly, and which just might feature the website, since it helped in researching the family history that the programme explores. I don’t know if it will actually be mentioned, but it would be nice validation of David Webb’s work if it was.

Both of these illustrate that family history and genealogy are a very important part of the reason that a site like this is interesting to a wide audience. Soon after the launch, as we started to get inquiries from family historians, I ventured onto their turf to ask in a couple of forums what we could do to make a site like this useful to them. The answer was basically “not a lot, it’s already what we need”; that’s gratifying, but I suspect there’s always more we could do. One thing might be to offer downloadable datasets; another (perhaps less for the benefit of genealogists) could be to integrate the biographies with related resources on photography, geography, social history, archive collections etc.

As well as inquries, there is another kind of contact we get through the site, where people write to add to or correct our information, and this is really exciting. Again, we pass the information on to David Webb for him to examine and process as he sees fit. So far, because of this roundabout flow of information, we have not re-integrated any information, but I would hope to do this in the future so if you have any amendments for us, please, please keep on sending them.

One final thing: I created a simple REST API for those geeks out there who want to play with the database. Sadly the quality of the address data isn’t that brilliant at present, which limits what we can do in terms of mashups until I get a chance to crunch it a bit, but if you want to play then please drop me a line and I’ll give you the keys.

So to wrap up, I would love to know your suggestions for how we might improve the site. Tell us things like

• what sort of information do you need that’s not obvious at present?
• would you like any tools to collect or download information?
• would it be useful to integrate a wiki with the site, so that each person can have a page that our site’s visitors can add to and edit?

Stick your ideas in the comments or drop us a line.

 In this guest post, Tony Grey, Finds Specialist at MoLAS, explains where he goes on his holidays.  He presents surprising parallels between the medieval sugar installation and ancient city at Zoara, southern Jordan, and London.

Starting in 2006 and continuing this year I have been lucky enough to spend leave time working on an archaeological project in Jordan. I would recommend this way of spending some leave time to anyone from MoLAS.

The project is based at two discrete sites near the village of Safi in southern Jordan near the southern end of the Dead Sea. The project was inspired by and jointly run by Dr K. D. Politis (Dino) head of the Hellenic Society for Near Eastern Research. The first excavation season took place in 2002 run by Dino and Glasgow University. Subsequent seasons have run from 2006-8 with the excavations carried out by Adelaide University.

The Tawahin es-Sukhar site is that of a medieval sugar mill while around 500 metres distant is the site of the ancient and medieval city of Zoara which is shown on the early Byzantine mosaic Madaba map. My job was to identify and record the post-Bronze Age pottery from both sites.

The sugar installation was in use from roughly the 12th/13th century to the 15th century. Sugar cane was widely grown in the Jordan Valley and Levant coast in this period. Water from the hills above the Valley was led by channel to a drop where it turned mill wheels that crushed the cane. The cane was then boiled in iron vats and the juice poured into pottery moulds and jars. An upper sugar cone jar sat in a lower molasses collecting jar. The refined fraction was cooled and solidified in the upper jar which then had to be broken to remove the sugar loaf. The heavy molasses fraction passed to the lower collecting jar. Hence the site has huge mounds of broken sugar pots. Several other similar sites are known in the Levant.

This refining technology was used in the same way for several centuries. By the 16th century Cyprus was a major producer for the European market. By the 18th century the centre of gravity of production was located in the Caribbean. Sugar was refined using raw sugar from the Caribbean in 18th century York and Southampton. It was also refined in London at several sites such as Bishopsgate Goods Yard (BGX05) where the sugar cone pots are much slimmer and narrower than the pots used in the medieval Levant and at Limehouse (Jarret 2005).

I attempted to form a sugar pot typology based on published parallels. It appears that the industry may have begun at this site by the time the Crusaders arrived on the scene for a short duration in the 12th century. Certainly the sugar pots along with other pottery were manufactured at the site as evidenced by wasters.

In all the excavation seasons separate digs explored parts of the ancient and medieval city. Nabataean architectural stone and small sherds of pottery date to around the 2nd century BC. Roman, Early Byzantine and medieval (Islamic) periods follow with a mosaic floor dating possibly to the 7th or 8th century AD uncovered this year. Huge quantities of pottery awaited me. Some had been packed wet and had to be laid out to dry. Beautiful sherds of high status early glazed wares may have been imports from the Iraq region as well as being locally made. Moulded cream ware jugs of the Abassid period jostled with pieces of cooking pot, jars and basins. The material included a few sherds of Early Byzantine orange burnished dishes and bowls classified as Late Roman Fine Ware by John Hayes (1972). Later glazed wares were common along with a few pieces that may belong to the Crusader 12th century. The pottery indicates a termination of occupation at the site by the 15th century in the Mamluk period. This later period was characterised by glazed fritwares imported from Syria, handmade painted coarsewares and by the pottery of the sugar production industry.

Petrological analysis and glaze analysis have been carried out on material from the first excavation season at Glasgow University and we await publication of the results.

This has been a wonderful opportunity to handle a wealth of ceramic material from this interesting and beautiful part of the world and I hope that I will be able to return to complete the job as much pottery still remains to be recorded in the dig house where a day’s work is concluded with a refreshing glass of arak and ice watching the sun go down over the Jordan Valley.

This year August is “Lucky Loser” month, where the three objects have all tried their luck once before, have come close but failed to win. However, now one of them will and join previous winners in December’s object of the year comp.

Follow the link to the archaeology blog to see which lucky losers are in the running and vote for your favourite. Result will be announced on Friday 5th Sept

  Smoking was introduced to Britain in the 16th century, and pipe and cigar smoking had become popular by the 19th century. Tabacco use continued to rise and the first mass produced cigarettes were introduced in the 1880s. Evidence of smoking is often demonstrated on archaeological sites in the form of clay pipes. These disposable items were easy to make and the different types and manufactures markings can provide valuable dating information.

Recent analysis of over 700 skeletons from the Catholic Mission of Saints Mary and Michael, Whitechapel, London, who died between 1843 and 1854, has demonstrated how evidence of smoking can also be observed in the bones of past populations.

 Fifty eight adult skeletons (58/268: 21.6%) displayed wear patterns to the surfaces of the teeth. These were often smooth, rounded grooves resulting from long term pipe smoking. In many cases a circular hole or ‘pipe notch’ was clearly visable when the upper and lower jaws were closed. Thirty two of the individuals with pipe notches also showed a brown coloured staining to the inside of the teeth. Pipe notches were found on a number of young adults. These may have developed over several years suggesting that smoking could have been taken up at a younger age. Adult smokers were also found to be more likely associated with lesions to the inside surfaces of the ribs, possibly the result of lung disease resulting from smoking.

This evidence may help provide information about how smoking affected the health of an individual and if it made more susceptible to other diseases and the infections compared to non smokers. If smoking was more commonplace amongst the Victorian working class, this may be used as an indicator of status and possibly gender. This may also help better our understanding and awareness of smoking in the modern world that is reported to kill 5.4 million people each year (World Health Organisation 2008).

A year on from the smoking ban, the museum of London looks into the history of smoking in London and life in the captial since the ban with a new exhibition ‘ The Big Smoke’. More information can be found at the following link…

http://www.molg.org.uk/English/NewsRoom/Current/The+Big+Smoke.htm

This week,  Clare Wood, Archivist for the Sainsbury Archive, introduces a new website that brings the Sainsbury Archive to life and asks you  to add your memories of working and shopping at Sainsbury’s:

Alongside my regular duties looking after the Sainsbury Archive, over the past year I’ve been busy creating ‘Story of a Supermarket’, a new website for the collection, which is now live within the Museum in Docklands website.

The Sainsbury Archive at the Museum in Docklands is a unique collection of photographs, documents and objects which tells the story of Sainsbury’s from its foundation in 1869 to the present day.  It’s a fascinating and varied collection, including everything from old packaging and recipes to Victorian tiles and staff uniforms.

This new website replaces the Sainsbury’s Virtual Museum educational site which was launched ten years ago. This popular site, which enabled schools to explore the archive via a virtual museum building, needed significant updating. We therefore decided to create a new site using the Museum of London’s content management system and page templates, retaining popular elements of the Virtual Museum, but also adding extra information and images from the archive to help answer some of the 400+ enquiries received each year.

We started work on the project last July, consulting with local primary school teachers, retired Sainsbury’s staff and people who had contacted the archive with an enquiry over the last couple of years. The results were sometimes surprising, but gave us a clear picture of what people liked and didn’t like about the old site, and the kinds of information they were looking for.

We frequently receive enquiries about aspects of social history such as food and nutrition during wartime and the employment of women.  We therefore decided to create pages for a range of popular topics, arranged under the themes of ‘People’, ‘Places’ ‘Products’ and ‘Progress’.  Researching and writing this content proved time-consuming, and we have tried to find the right level of detail, so that the information is useful, but not overwhelming…

To add a personal touch to the official records in the archive, there is also a contributory area for visitors to add their memories of working and shopping at Sainsbury’s. All stories submitted will be added to the collection and highlights will be published on the website.

For schools at Key Stage 2, our Learning consultant trawled the archive to produce six curriculum-linked units exploring the history of food, shops and shopping. Linked to these are classroom activities, interactive quizzes, a timeline, and a scrapbook of images to download.

For informal family learning, as well as the quizzes and scrapbook, we have recycled popular features and activities from the Virtual Museum, including old-fashioned packaging to colour and make, the chance to ‘Explore a Store’ from 1909 and ‘Harry’s story’, a day in the life of a  Sainsbury’s delivery boy in 1912.

The project has grown quite a bit since its inception and the resulting website is a large and detailed resource. The collection is highly visual, so I’m particularly pleased that the new site features around 300 images. ‘Story of a supermarket’ has actually been live since May 2008, but following testing and approval by external stakeholders, we have now begun to tell people it’s there!

We’re also planning to showcase the site at ‘The way we shopped’, a day of free talks, film screenings and activities inspired by the Sainsbury Archive, which is being held at the Museum in Docklands on Saturday 4th October.
‘Story of a Supermarket’ is located within the Museum in Docklands website under ‘Collections Online’ and can also be found at: www.museumindocklands.org.uk/sainsburyarchive

Late:Create is an exciting monthly workshop where members get creative using our collections for inspiration.   

Photographer Fil Gierlinski lead August’s Late:Create session, and the group learned how to create that perfect picture. 

Our regular blogger, Liam, tells us more:

‘This month’s Late:Create was photography. Fil, the photographer, showed us how a picture captures the texture and shape of an object. When learnt how to take pictures close up using the camera’s macro setting. We paired up and went outside taking close-ups of anything we could find. We took photos of walls, railings, pavements, stairs and anything with an unusual surface. We produced some eye-catching images. We then took the cameras into the museum galleries and from different angles captured an object that would tell us a story about it - its shape - its texture - and what it was. Finally we watched a slideshow of everyone’s work.’

See more photos of the workshop here!

Late: Create is free and takes place 6 – 8pm on the 1^st Thursday of every month and is for people who are currently out of work.  Future workshops include creative writing and sculpture.  The sessions are coordinated by the Museum’s Inclusion Officer, Lucie Fitton. To find out more contact community@museumoflondon.org.uk